Mark L. Chambers

This book will be of use to a real novice when it comes to opening up a PC and adding parts. However, anyone who has already upgraded memory, installed a video card or new hard disk, or added RAM is going to find most of this book pretty skippable. Although it was published in 2009, it already seems a bit like ancient history - though the author's general approaches are usually sound. For some reason, however, he spends an inordinate amount of time talking about modems. Surely anyone contemplating building his or her own PC isn't interested in modems! If you are a more advanced PC user who is disgusted with the quality of desktops from HP and Dell (and others) and wants to build something yourself, this book would have been much stronger had it gone into more detail about the actual selecting of parts and building the PC, instead of spending at least half the book providing very basic PC advice that is barely relevant to the task at hand. A much better source for building your own PC is Maximum PC magazine, a subscription to which I highly recommend.… (mere)